Professionalizing Teacher Education : Performance Assessment, Standards, Moderation, and Evidence

This book provides a significant contribution to conversations about teacher quality and graduate readiness for teaching. It presents empirical insights into how a multidisciplinary team of researchers, teacher educators, and policy personnel mobilized for collective change in a standards-driven reform initiative. The insights are research-informed and critically relevant for anyone interested in teacher preparation and credentialing. It gives an account of a bold move to install a collaborative culture of evidence-informed inquiry to professionalize teacher education.

The centerpiece of the book is the use of standards and evidence to show the quality of graduates entering the teaching workforce. The book presents, for the first time, a model of online cross-institutional moderation as benchmarking to generate large-scale evidence of the quality of teacher education. The book also introduces a new conceptualization of a feedback loop using summative data for accountability and formative data to inform curriculum review and program renewal.

This book offers the insider story of the conceptualization, design, and implementation of the Graduate Teacher Performance Assessment (GTPA). It involves going to scale with a large group of Australian universities, government agencies, and schools, and using participatory approaches to advance new thinking about evidence-informed inquiry, cross-institutional moderation, and innovative digital infrastructure.

The discussion of competence assessment, standards, and change processes presented in the book has relevance beyond teacher education to other professions.

Claire Wyatt-Smith (Ph.D.) is Professor of Educational Assessment and Measurement and the Director of the Institute for Learning Sciences and Teacher Education, Australian Catholic University. Her research focusses on standards, moderation, professional judgment, and the implications of digital disruption for teacher professionalism. Current research includes a large-scale Australian study working with a national Collective of universities on the design and implementation of the Graduate Teacher Performance Assessment (GTPA). She has held leadership roles in universities and schools in Australia and advisory roles internationally. She currently leads a longitudinal quantitative analysis of the quality and impact of initial teacher education. She has undertaken many large-scale studies with Australian Research Council and other research consultancy funds. Her latest books with colleagues are Digital Disruption in Teaching and Testing: Assessments, Big Data and the Transformation of Schooling (2021, Routledge) and Teaching Performance Assessments as a Cultural Disruptor in Initial Teacher Education: Standards, Evidence and ollaboration (2021, Springer).

Lenore Adie (Ph.D.) is Associate Professor of Teacher Education and Assessment, and Senior Research Fellow at the Institute for Learning Sciences and Teacher Education, Australian Catholic University. Her research focuses on assessment and moderation processes as these contribute to quality assurance and improvement purposes. Her research has generated new knowledge in the field of assessment, focusing on quality in assessment practices and processes, in particular, within systems of standards-referenced assessment. She currently leads an Australian Research Council project investigating the use of scaled annotated exemplars of achievement standards in online moderation to improve teacher assessment capability. She has extensive professional experience working in schools as a teacher and in leadership positions, and in teacher education for over 30 years.

Michele Haynes (Ph.D.) is Professor of Data Analytics for Education Research at the Institute for Learning Sciences and Teacher Education, Australian Catholic University. She is an accredited statistician in Australia with extensive experience as a statistical methodologist and innovator using longitudinal data for education research. Michele has expertise in the estimation of complex models for social applications using data from multiple sources, including panel surveys and administrative data.

Chantelle Day (Ph.D.) is Research Partnerships Manager at the Institute for Learning Sciences and Teacher Education, Australian Catholic University. A significant priority within her portfolio includes management of the Institute’s largest, longitudinal research project titled the Graduate Teacher Performance Assessment: Standards and Moderation Project. Chantelle has experience in managing and supporting research projects involving various stakeholders and has worked at the Institute since the completion of her doctoral studies in 2017. Chantelle’s research expertise extends to the fields of equity and inclusion in higher education, teacher education, and assessment.